Peter Kafka of the MediaMemo blog at the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsDigital caught an interesting aside from Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt,in a press conference last week in New York City. They fronted it as "Schmidt stressed the importance of porting Google’s Chrome browser to Apple’s Mac platform and said this would happen within months."

The phrase "within months" left a lot of observers understandably unimpressed: as one commenter put it, "10 months is still "months", right? I'm not holding my breath."

I see a lot of Macs in this room, and a lot of very sophisticated people are using Macs now and we need to get a version of Chrome out for that, which we’ll have in a couple of months.

"A couple of months" - though admittedly not much more definitive than just plain "months" - at least has a more encouraging ring to it, and MacNN spun Schmidt's comment as suggesting the browser "should be released before Christmas."

Is it important, though, exactly when a newcomer browser (whose userbase has been disparaged by none other than The Ballmer as the equivalent of a "rounding error" in the calculation of IE users) releases its stable build to the Mac community? Firefox Mac is mature (if often memory-hoggy), Safari is solid and Opera continues to be a best-of-class browser. I use a mix of those, plus Fluid for site-specific apps and never have a fraction of the problems I encounter when I use my Windows machine.

I'd be interested to read anyone's experience with the Chromium dev channel builds in comments. Is it better... or just Different?

i use chromium a lot more than i use safari now.......its absurd how fast it is....i don't like the way it handles downloads, but thats about the only think i use safari for anymore....haven't actually tried the dev build of chrome though.

Chromium snapshot builds are further ahead than Google Chrome, but auto-update is not enabled, so you have to browse through the nightly build directory so it is a pain to update. However if you run this tool every day or so, you get the latest version of chromium to use without having to browse the directory.

It's very good; the GUI compared to Firefox handles its space more efficiently (important on a 13' screen) and it does feel faster than both Safari and Firefox (there was a report that an earlier build of chromium is 34% faster than Safari 4.0.3)

I am dying to use it as my main browser but it's still missing little things that stop me from using it all the time.
I cannot (yet) rearrange the bookmarks bar
Flash performance is so-so
I get weird bugs in Activity Monitor (Chromium helper takes up 124% CPU?)
The theme selection is utter crap; you're far better off with the default look.
Below is a screenshot of it on my Mac
Once this thing is final, I will be on it double-time.

Way better than Safari could ever hope to be in terms of speed. I use Safari mostly because of 1password integration, but if Chrome had that and the extensions Firefox has it would be the best browser hands dwon. If I'm just killing time cruising the net I use Chrome because it's so fast. I would recommend that anyone not using it should give it a try.